On the first day of Eid, Tuesday, more than 11,500 tourists from central and southern Iraq entered the capital Erbil through a single border crossing, the Sherawa-Kirkuk point, Salam Khoshnaw, head of Erbil’s border crossings, told Rudaw’s Farhad Dolamari on Wednesday.
In the five days before the holiday started, more than 75,500 tourists entered Erbil, according to the province's tourism directorate.
The tourism sector in the Kurdistan Region is recovering this summer after the industry took a hit last year due to coronavirus lockdowns. According to tourism officials, the Region saw the highest number of tourists visiting in 2019. They expect Eid visitors this year to be similar to 2019.
Nearly two million tourists from federal Iraq visited the Kurdistan Region in the first half of 2021, according to the tourism board.
Video from Sulaimani province’s Ahmedawa resort on Wednesday showed crowds of unmasked tourists and locals dancing, swimming, and taking photos and videos of the waterfall.
The Kurdistan Region’s Ministry of Health has issued warnings about the severity of a spike in coronavirus infections. The highly contagious Delta variant has been detected and both Iraq and the Region hit their highest daily new cases in the past week.
The Kurdistan Region is seeing a third wave of the virus, recording nearly two thousand cases daily in the past few days. The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) Ministry of Interior on Monday closed down wedding halls and cinemas again.
In May, the Ministry of Interior lifted a coronavirus-related weekend ban on travel between the Kurdistan Region and Iraqi provinces. Despite that ban, more than 600,000 tourists visited between January and April, Amal Jalal, the head of Kurdistan Region's tourism board told Rudaw Radio.
